AUC V-Lab launches 10 new startups in its third round

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As part of its ongoing efforts to support startups and
entrepreneurs in Egypt, the
AUC Venture Lab has announced the 10 startups that selected to
participate in its third edition.

It’s obvious that the V-Lab team pays a great amount of
attention to ensuring a diverse mix of ideas in its incubator. The
third edition’s projects vary between energy, music, digital games,
education, recycling, entertainment, tourism, and sports:

Tumbleweed will provide a social guide for
travel, allowing users to discover and track other users’ touristic
experiences and activities. The app is currently under construction
for both Android and iOS.

STEBN offers smart solutions for the traffic
congestion crisis in Egypt, providing bicycle stations at various
places in the city, where subscribers can borrow a bicycle with a
smart card and then return it to any other station (like systems
currently in place in New York and London).

Ion-7 is an up-and-coming studio for the
development of mobile phone 3D games for both Android and iOS.

Creative Bits is based on the snowball
strategy to help people build their apps. The company offers the
e-robot kit to teach kids programming, electronics, game
development, and engineering in a fun and exciting way.

Shireet works on discovering unknown bands and
managing their digital rights in order to produce albums. The
company also aims to produce high-quality videos.

Soutak.com is a platform that allows people to
communicate with the people representing them in any type of
election (parliament, clubs, students union), allowing people to
learn about their candidates as well as their qualifications,
electoral programs, and plans after they win the elections, and to
follow up on the candidates’ implementation of their promises after
they win.

Top Admissions Choice is an online platform
that helps students choose the universities that best suit them and
the various specialization options and courses, as well as send out
college applications.

Jozour produces wood panels out of palm fronds
using an innovative pressing machine with the help of recyclable
materials. These panels are then used in furniture and decoration
factories.

Gymawy is a mobile phone application for both
Android and iOS that aims at turning gym sessions into a lifestyle
by providing a personal trainer for every user. The more the user
sticks to their workouts, the more points he gets, which he can
redeem for free diet meals from renowned restaurants across
Egypt.

Waffarly is an e-commerce platform that sells
power-saving home appliances with the aim of reducing home and
office monthly utility bills. Products include solar-energy lamps,
water-saving taps, and others.

Around 180 teams applied for V-Lab’s third edition. As always,
V-Lab awarded the startups with a selection of integrated
incubation benefits, including office space, access to university
facilities and IT tools, mentorship and coaching sessions by
experts, as well as funding of up to 20,000 EGP (just under $3,000
USD).

The third edition participants did not however all agree on the
extent to which they benefitted from the program, which still has
one more month to go. Ahmed Elsayed, cofounder of Gymawy, and Omar
Khashaba from Top Admissions Choice agreed on “the importance of
the incubator providing specialized training sessions for every
company in its own field, instead of focusing on the concept of
entrepreneurship in general.”

Zeina from Jozour, on the other hand said that “it is not the
first time to we take part in an incubator’s program; V-Lab was the
most beneficial of them all, as it allowed us to communicate and
network with mentors and investors, some of whom already showed
interest in delving into the details of our projects.”

Haitham Mostafa, cofounder of Soutak, expressed his overwhelming
satisfaction with the training sessions and the funding amount,
while Mohammed Salameh, cofounder of Shireet noted that “our
business plan had some serious mistakes. We ended up changing the
whole business model after we enrolled in the incubator from which
we benefitted immensely.”

All entrepreneurs agreed that the best training sessions were
those about digital marketing and sales, and what investors expect
from entrepreneurs, offered by Houssam Allam, founder of Cairo Angels, a platform for
venture investors.

Regarding these successful sessions in particular, Ayman Ismail,
developer of the entrepreneurship program in the first
university incubator in Egypt, said: “We are discovering more
closely with time what entrepreneurs need from us and then we’re
working on providing it, which is what we have achieved by
organizing lectures on financial and legal management for startups,
after we sensed their need for it.”